This master thesis deals with one of the current trends in cinema - the so-called climate change film. Film as a popular medium is able to influence public debate and this paper's main objective is to explain how environmental issues can be portrayed in film and how such films shape the climate change debate. In the first, theoretical part of this thesis, the aim is to briefly introduce the history and context of climate change debate from the 1970s to the present day based on sources primarily from interdisciplinary cultural and environmental studies. It also explains how environmental problems started to arise in different art spheres, above all in American cinema from 1995 to the present. The second part analyzes four American feature films of different genres: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) directed by Roland Emmerich's, The Road (2009) directed by John Hillcoat, Before the Flood (2016) directed by Fisher Stevens and Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017). The final chapter summarizes the findings, explains the currently prevalent apocalyptic narrative and discusses why such approach is not effective and how filmmakers need to transform climate change stories into positive narratives that inspire change and hope.

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This dissertation examines how the major television networks, in conjunction with the Reagan administration, launched a lingering cloud of nuclear anxiety that helped to revive the Cold War during the 1980s. Placed within a larger political and cultural post-war context, this national preoccupation with a global show-down with the Soviet Union at times both hindered and bolstered Reagan’s image as the archetypal conservative, cowboy President that could free America from its liberal adolescent past now caustically referred to as “the sixties.” This stalwart image of Reagan, created and carefully managed by a number of highly-paid marketing executives, as one of the embodiment of peaceful deterrence, came under attack in the early 1980s when the “liberal” Nuclear Freeze movement showed signs of becoming politically threatening to the staunch conservative pledging to win the Cold War at any cost. And even if the nuclear freeze movement itself was not powerful enough to undergo the Herculean task of removing the President in 1984, the movement was compassionate enough to appeal to a mass audience, especially when framed in narrative form on network television. In the early 1980s, debates over the possibility of nuclear war and other pertinent Cold War related issues became much more democratized in their visibility on the network airwaves. However, the message disseminated from the networks was not placed in an educational framework, nor did these television productions clarify complicated nuclear issues such as nuclear winter theory and proliferation. I argue this renewed network attention on nuclear issues was not placed in an historical framework and likely confused American viewers because it routinely exposed audiences to both fact and fiction, undifferentiated at the level of the mass media.